My gratuitous Don Imus post

"The civil rights movement for your generation is economic."

Those words were said to me by Nathan A. Chapman, the man who started the country's first, and thus far only black-controlled, publicly-traded investment bank, only weeks before I got my first job as a business reporter. It was seven years ago, five years before Nate's company spectacularly crumbled, before Nate himself was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to a seven-year stretch in a white-collar scandal.

He said those words across the coffee table in his private office, on the 28th floor of the World Trade Center in Baltimore, with spectacular views overlooking the Inner Harbor, in a meeting my college's president hooked up for me. I was 23, and it was weeks before I got my degree, just as the dot-com sector and the stock market went bust, around the time the housing bubble started getting inflated, a half-decade before it burst under the pressure of exorbitant home prices and sub-prime mortgages. It was before it was hot for a twenty-something from the projects to write about Corporate America in the mainstream media.

And it was before Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team some nappy-headed hoes.

How does Imus relate?

What happened to Imus in the wake of his comment shows how prescient Nate's words were in framing my then-infantile career as a business writer, the real challenges for my generation and even this blog, long before I ever imagined I'd write it. Imus' words created an uproar in the media and, of course, among old-school civil rights types. But it wasn't a march or a protest that ultimately brought him down. Imus made his comment during his Wednesday, April 4 radio show. By the following Monday he'd been told he would be suspended for two weeks, but was still on the air. But the next day, April 10, Staples and Procter & Gamble pulled their ads from his TV slot on MSNBC.

General Motors shook him off the next morning, as did American Express, which had been spending a reported $1.2 million in ad dollars on the program. By that evening, MSNBC dropped Imus' show altogether. No marches. No organized boycotts. No sit-ins. Some of America's biggest companies decided that sponsoring Imus wasn't worth the risk of potentially alienating millions of black checkbooks. Maybe Spike Lee said it best in an interview on the Today Show: "I'm going to spend $100 in Staples today. I'm buying Bigelow Tea. I'm buying Procter & Gamble..."

Economics -- the civil rights platform for my generation -- was the final arbiter in the disposal of Don Imus.

And with that, I bring you this new blog, "Ways & Means", a look at how we relate to the rest of America and the world, through our individual and collective economic condition. Most of my posts will be (a lot) shorter than this, and they'll also be short on, if not devoid of my own opinions and any financial advice -- I'm a journalist, not a pundit or financial adviser, after all. Much of what I talk about here will be in the form of anecdotes that hopefully put the financial condition of black folks -- particularly our generation of black folks -- in context. And since I need to write often, I hope you all read me, either here or at my other blog, and send me all the suggestions, criticisms or ideas you have to offer. Hope you enjoy.

We're getting bigger and better

I said when BPM relaunched that I planned on growing the site and expanding beyond it with my writing on financial literacy. Now I'm happy to announce that my work here is baring fruit, and I've been approached by AOL BlackVoices to partner with them in creating a new blog called "Ways & Means".

Scheduled to launch at BlackVoices on April 16, Ways & Means will also be focused on financial literacy, particularly among young, professional African-Americans looking to get their economic footing right. Unlike here, where I post more sporadically, Ways & Means will have new posts daily, which means I'm hoping for a lot more feedback from you with suggestions of new topics to keep the flow going.

Just like here, what I write will be anecdotal, about sharing stories that relate to financial trends as opposed to advice, given I'm a journalist and not a financial professional. Blackpeoplesmoney.com will continue to exist and I hope you'll continue to check us out here while making Ways & Means one of the sites you visit on a regular basis.

Thanks for reading.

Cents-less violence?

My last few posts were about the cause of the race-wealth gap. It's a subject that deserves attention, but more pressing is the conversation about the gap's effects on minority communities, especially in inner cities.

Two recent stories, in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe point out how a surge in violence among young, black and unemployed males -- is tied directly to lack of education and economic opportunity. (Recall, my last post asked whether the wealth gap was cause by lack of education or cultural factors).

In some cities, violent crime is up at an alarming rate. Philadelphia has already topped 100 murders this year. Boston, though its violent crime rate pales in comparison, has seen a spike in shootings, including a ridiculous incident last Friday when an 18 year old black male was shot in the head on a city bus -- just about a mile from both the Globe's offices and my own apartment. The increase in violence is happening as some economists say the economy is slowing down -- remember the adage about black folks catching the flu when the economy has a cold? In fact, Steve Bailey's column in the Globe points quotes a speech by Ben S. Bernake, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, that warned about the consequences of a growing gap between "superstar" have and regular-people have-nots. (Coincidentally, Bernake quoted a story I wrote for the Globe earlier this year).

I talked to Steve after his column ran and he said he wanted to kick himself for forgetting to include one important stat from a study which pointed out that black male high school dropouts are employed at lower rates and earn far less money than either white or Hispanic dropouts. They also die violently at higher rates than whites or Hispanics. But for black males who go to college and graduate, the income gap narrows and the disparity in murder rates nearly disappears.

What's that mean? In short: regardless of what causes the wealth gap in America, a lack of education among black males equates to a lack of economic opportunity, which in turn equates, for far too many, to a quick trip to the graveyard. On the other hand, get some of these cats off the street and into a classroom, and there's a strong argument that not only does the wealth gap close, but the violence almost certainly disappears.